One Good Mama Bone

by McClain, Bren; Monroe, Mary Alice;

  She removed her sunglasses.

  There were oxfords and work boots and fancy cowboy boots. She curled her toes in her new shoes. She had room to, unlike her boy, who had outgrown his brogans last spring. She’d taken a knife and cut through the leather to allow his toes for more room. He was the one who needed new shoes. She took her feet from her new ones.

  “Next stop Richbourg’s,” Mildred said and opened her automobile door.

  Sarah knew she looked a sight with her eyes puffy and red. “What if I just stay here?”

  “No, ma’am.” Mildred stepped out.

  Sarah couldn’t disappoint. She put her shoes back on and set her hat on top of her kerchief and stepped out into the air, full of the smell of bread from Merita Bakery across the road. Her stomach made a rumbling sound.

  Mildred got a buggy and pushed it to the back of the store, to the meat counter. “Why, they’ve taken Charles’s picture down and replaced it with the new winner.” She pointed to a framed photograph hanging on the wall beside a swinging door. It was a boy with a big grin and pale skin.

  The door swung open, and a man stepped through, wearing a white full-body apron, covered with splashes of bright red. Some of the red looked to be wet. It was blood. “Mrs. Dobbins,” he said and wiped his hands down the front.

  “Why, Mr. Bowen, I was just telling Mrs. Creamer here that I see Charles’s picture has been replaced.”

  “The Glenn boy, yes. We’re late getting it up. We got used to having Charles back here.”

  Sarah’s eyes moved to the left of the photograph, to some words etched on a shiny brass plaque as large as a mirror a rich woman could hang in her hallway. “Proud to say Home of the Grand Champion.” The smell of meat and refrigeration went up her nose. She felt a rush of blood shoot to her head.

  “I hope Big LC never comes in here,” Mildred said. She was giggling, as was the man.

  But Sarah was not. She was reading the individual plates, lined up in vertical rows beneath the words. The first one said Edwin McClain, 1941. The next nine listed L. Charles Dobbins, Jr., with the corresponding years 1942 to 1950. The final name was Neal Glenn, 1951. The space beneath it sat empty and ready for the next boy’s name.

  Sarah’s heart was racing now. Surely they weren’t meaning they butchered the grand champion and brought him here for sale? Surely this is not how he was honored for being the top cow.

  “Sarah, dear, what kind of meat would you like?” Mildred asked.

  Sarah lowered the netting over her eyes.

  “We’ll get Mr. Bowen to cut it up and wrap it special for you.”

  Sarah looked through the pattern of tiny squares, outlined in thin black lines. It felt like a screen. She wanted to be behind a screen. “You’ve done too much already.” She took a step back.

  “Why, fiddle dee dee. How about a nice rump roast for Sunday dinner and two nice steaks and some hamburger for a good meatloaf? A fryer, too. How does that sound?”

  Emerson Bridge hadn’t had meat like that since he was five years old. She pictured his ribs. She pictured him with a plate full of meat. His little belly would be full.

  Sarah swallowed. She began to nod.

  The man went back through the door.

  Surely, “home” meant Anderson as in Anderson was the home of the grand champion. Or “home” as in mothers of the grand champion boys do their grocery shopping here. Mildred did.

  When the man returned with the meat, Sarah asked him, “Excuse me, sir, but do the mamas of the other boys that won, that McClain boy and the Glenn, do their mamas trade in here, too?”

  “From time to time, yes ma’am.”

  There it was, her answer. She let out a deep breath. It made no sense to kill the grand champion. He was the hero. That would be like killing Scarlett O’Hara, because she was the top actress in that movie. Sarah lifted her netting.

  The man placed four packages, all wrapped in white butcher paper, in the buggy. Stamped across each one were words in purple that told the type of meat. The cost was written with a black grease pencil. Sarah added them up. Two dollars and thirty-two cents. That was almost a full dress.

  Outside in the automobile, Sarah kicked out her feet in the floorboard and told herself her boy wouldn’t have new shoes just yet, but he would have meat. She balled up her fist and put her finger on her first knuckle and called that December, which would be the next month, and then began counting forward, dipping down for January and back up for February and then down again for March. That was four months away. The day he won, she’d bring him here and buy him a pair of every kind of shoes in the window in front of her.

  “Shoes tell a person,” Mildred told her, her voice flat now.

  Sarah realized she’d not smelled peppermints all morning.

  “The day I met Big LC, he was wearing a fine suit, but his shoes were covered in so much dust, you could write your name in it. I knew he was trying to be a rich man, and I felt sorry for him. All of my other beaus had been the same, perfect and perfectly boring. Thought I’d take him on as a project, teach him how to be. I started with his shoes, took him to my daddy’s shoeshine man at the hotel and got his shoes shined so spiffy, I tried to see myself in them.”

  Sarah waited for more, but nothing else came. “Well, did you? Did you see yourself?”

  “I was blurred.”

  Sarah couldn’t remember Harold’s shoes the day she met him. “What about love? Your husband love you?”

  Mildred stayed quiet but then said, “Let’s put our sunglasses back on. We’re movie stars, remember.”

  They returned them to their faces and headed back down Whitehall. Sarah was hoping that Mildred didn’t answer her question because Big LC loved her so much, Mildred didn’t want to make Sarah feel bad for having a husband who cheated.

  At the grain elevator, Mildred pulled off the road. Sarah was thinking she must be ready to talk, but Mildred pulled a shiny, almost flat, container from her pocketbook and unscrewed the top. She had a drink, a long one. “I feel a sore throat coming on,” she said and held it out for Sarah, who shook her head. It smelled like Retonga. “Let’s run by the house and get Big LC’s Kodak, so we can have this day forever.” She popped a peppermint in her mouth.

  Mildred put the automobile back in gear, but it did not move. “I told you a story, Sarah. I don’t have a sore throat.”

  Sarah raised the netting all the way. She reached for Mildred’s hand.

  The women squeezed. Their skin against each other was just skin, equal skin.

  Mildred pulled back onto the road.

  She drove to her house and ran inside for the camera.

  Sarah removed her sunglasses and found herself squinting in the bright sunshine. She heard sounds, loud ones like cries, in the direction of the barn. She loosened her kerchief knot beneath her chin so she could hear. They were from cows, lots of them.

  When Mildred returned, Sarah asked her, “Is something wrong with the cows?”

  “Oh, that’s the mamas and their babies,” Mildred said as she backed out the driveway. Today’s what they call weaning day when they separate them.”

  Sarah felt her stomach turn over.

  “I’ve heard it so many times over the years, I don’t hear it anymore. I did way back. Odd how you get used to it.”

  Sarah didn’t understand how a person could get used to that.

  “Big LC says it’s the natural order, because the mamas already are pregnant and need the milk they are making for their new babies.”

  The sack of meat in Sarah’s lap felt heavy and cold. Chills lined her body. In all that sunlight, she was cold.

  She put her sunglasses back on.

  At home, Mildred had Sarah lean up against the automobile. “Do it like a movie star, like you are without a care in the world.” But Sarah didn’t know what that position would be like. So she just leaned straight back. Mildred snapped her picture.

  Then Sarah took the camera and Mildred leaned. She held her body strai
ght from her waist down but her upper body at a slant.

  Mildred left the driveway. She honked her horn most of the way out.

  Sarah waved to her in her new shoes, the sack of meat in the crook of her right arm. Dust coated her new shoes. They were already dirty.

  She looked for Lucky. He was on the ground.

  A note was stuck in the screened door. It was from Duke Power. “Disconnected until payment received” was printed across the top. She still had a nickel’s worth of kerosene.

  Her boy needed food. Tonight he would have a feast.

  Sarah brought the meat inside and fired up the woodstove. She had no ice for the ice box. She would need to cook it all. She would wear her new shoes and cook it all.

  …..

  Sarah filled her boy’s plate with beef roast and a steak and loose hamburger meat, along with a leg and breast from the fryer.

  When he sat down to eat, she told him, “Cooked you a plate of meat. You hungry for meat?”

  He shoved the plate aside and returned to the outside.

  Her boy wasn’t hungry. This is what she told herself.

  She was still wearing her new shoes. She wanted to put her old ones back on, but that no longer was an option.

  Sarah shoved her plate aside, too.

  From the fence, the mother cow watched her young, his body prone to the ground. He had gathered on his feet that day, but had returned to the earth. She listened now as his hooves scraped the dirt, his rhythm familiar, one she had known at his birth, when, in time, she had gained what she needed to set herself high again and return to him.

  As darkness fell, he set himself high again and made his way to her, his head tall enough now to rise above the top wire. She licked his face and moved her mouth down his body, while inside the mother cow, her new young lay, now the size of a cat and halfway through its journey towards home.

  The gentle wind and her little one were no longer there, but they had been. The mother cow had grown accustomed to them, especially to the gentle wind, who often brought handfuls of grass and slices of pears.

  I started to go hide from you, Mama Red. Not come out here no more and talk to you, because my mind was trying to go down some real bad tracks. My boy, too. But he just come running in the house saying Lucky was on his feet, and that’s cause for me to come hug your neck and his.

  Can I tell you I’m feeling like I might be in over a little my head a bit with you and him. I guess you can tell I don’t know nothing about your kind. But I want to. I brought you a slice of a pear. I like feeling your lips against the palm of my hand. Kind of tickles.

  I appreciate you listening to me talk. Did I tell you I have a new friend, Mildred? She lives at that place where you used to. She made me remember that I wasn’t always that bad word I told you my mama called me. Slittail. There was a time when I was the exact opposite. There was a time when I was some kind of woman, I was, Mama Red. It started the day my first friend, Mattie, walked into my cold chicken bone of a life. That was April 9th, 19 and 38. That could have been the eighth day of creation and written up in my mama’s Bible. It’d say, “And God created Sarah and Mattie’s friendship. And saw that it was good.” If ever there was a time when Jesus might have give me the time of day, it was then, because any kind of good I had in me, Sister Mattie brought it out like dried beans soaked good in water and made all plump, so they’d be fit to eat.

  After I had that baby girl and that doctor took her away, I took to the bed. But, after about a month of that, Harold brought this woman into our room and said, “Sarah, this here is Mattie. She’s our new neighbor from across the yard. She’s a woman. Maybe she can help you.”

  He left the room, and the space opened up between me and her. She was standing at the foot of the bed. She was a scrawny little something. I saw right quick I made two of her. “I’m fat,” I told her.

  “I’m skinny,” she said.

  I saw her dimples, how they were sunk deep into her cheeks, and I knew there was something she was happy about. “You got you any children?” I asked.

  She shook her head. She had a little nose so delicate you’d think it would break. “Me and Billy Udean ain’t been lucky like that yet,” she said.

  I told her about Little Claudia and that I couldn’t never have no more.

  She stepped up towards me, and through the air come her hand like it had a purpose to it. “What about if I wash your hair?” she asked me.

  “It’s filthy,” I told her. I was embarrassed of it. It was plumb soaked through in grease.

  But her hand was still held out. For me. I took mine from under the covers and grabbed onto it.

  I was a little weak, but I got myself to the kitchen, to the sink, and she drew water and washed my hair. When she finished, I made me a bun.

  She told me she wished she knew how to do that. She said, “Billy Udean hates that my hair’s all stringy.”

  I told her I’d teach her, and that’s what I set about to do. Harold come in, and Mattie froze up like she was scared. But I reckon he saw that we were doing female business and went on back outside. Mattie said to me, “You ain’t scared to carry on like this in front of him?”

  I told her, “He can’t stop me from having a friend.” And when I said that word, “friend,” I got goosebumps go all over me.

  Her dimples sunk in deep.

  I didn’t want no secrets between us, so I told her, “I ain’t saved. Tomorrow’s Sunday, and I don’t go to church.”

  I watched her to see if she’d leave me cold, but she didn’t do that. She stayed right there and said, “I don’t either. Billy Udean likes to fish on Sunday.”

  We went to laughing. Mama Red, we did. “Our giggle boxes are turned plumb over,” she said to me. And they were.

  That was the beginning of us, me and Mattie. That right there was.

  I think back on our beginning, mine and yours, and I want you to know I wouldn’t do nothing on purpose to hurt you. Do you know that? My bones got rattled some today, but I’m thinking now I might have been borrowing trouble. I don’t want to borrow no trouble.

  NOVEMBER 24–26, 1951

  This was a momentous day, Luther was thinking at breakfast that Saturday. “Hammer-mill time. Just me and you, boy. Gave Uncle the day off.”

  Mildred’s hand came his way. “He’s got a cold, Big LC. Maybe he needs to stay in and rest.”

  On the tip of Luther’s tongue were words that reflected the old Luther, words like, “Was I talking to you?” but he did not let them unfurl. He took a deep breath and in a voice that he hoped was pleasant said, “Us Dobbins men have Dobbins work to do.”

  This was day six of living as a good man. He knew he still had some kinks to work out, so he wasn’t too alarmed that he’d felt some anger towards Mildred just then. The key was not acting on it. A lot could be accomplished in six days. God had created the world in that length of time.

  He felt the morning’s sausage high in his chest. All night he’d stayed awake going over in his mind how to operate the hammer mill, something he’d never done before. He wanted to prove to LC that he could do it by himself. Uncle had already connected the belt to the tractor drum, and all Luther had to do that morning was start the tractor and engage the gear that ran the belt that made the knives in the hammer mill begin moving. It would be easy.

  He slid his chair back from the table and slapped his boy on his shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said and headed outside and marveled at sky of that perfect shade of crystal blue

  But his boy did not follow him. That was even better, he was thinking. It would give Luther time to get the tractor started. He’d only done it once before, and that was the day he’d bought it in 1946. It was a hand starter, a John Deere H. He wished now that it had an electric starter like the new tractors of the day. Fleet McClain and Joseph Allgood had electric starters.

  He stood between the tractor’s left big wheel and the flywheel, a solid circle of metal about the size of the steering wheel. Then he rea
ched over, moved the throttle and pulled out the choke, placing his hands on the flywheel and finding the two grooves that Uncle had said. His hands were sweating, but he tried to get a good grip and give it all the muscle he had.

  It moved some but did not crank.

  The back screen door slammed. There came his boy.

  He gripped the flywheel tighter and hollered, “A grand champion animal requires grand champion actions, boy.” He closed his eyes and pictured Uncle’s hands. He had turned the wheel the wrong way.

  His boy did not come to stand beside him but upfront on the other side of the tractor, near the hammer mill. He was sure his boy was watching. Luther leaned his full body to the right and turned the wheel, the engine making a slight sparking sound. He wiped his hands down his pant legs and grabbed on again, heaving the biggest turn he could muster. This time it cranked, sending forth that blessed sputtering sound.

  But then it began to fade.

  “Push the choke back in, Dad!” his boy called out.

  Luther pushed it in. The sputtering became stronger until it kicked in full and settled into a steady stream, Luther now standing on his tiptoes and looking over the tractor at his boy. He wanted to hear words like, Good job, Dad, but his boy said nothing. LC wasn’t even looking at him. He was kicking dead corn cobs with his feet.

  Maybe he was waiting for Luther to engage the belt. Luther climbed into the tractor seat, placed his foot on the clutch, and slipped the gear to the side. The belt began turning. He could hear the wheel of knives spinning inside the hammer mill, all ready to grind. He would stay in the seat until his boy looked his way. Luther waved his hand to get his attention, but LC had already resumed his place at the end of the feed table, ready to shovel in the ears of corn. Luther had not told LC where to stand, but that’s exactly where he wanted him. Luther wondered if the billy shovel would be too heavy for the boy. It was about as tall as LC in length and almost twice as wide at its scooping end.

  Luther dismounted and took his position, securing a burlap sack to the downspout of the sacker funnel. It was only a matter of twisting a lever. He hollered, “Shove them in, boy!!”